​In the first part of my review of David Wilcock’s bestselling nonfiction book The Ascension Mysteries (Dutton, 2016), we learned that Wilcock believes (or pretends to believe) himself to be a divinely ordained spiritual leader born to undo the convulsive Satanic curse that was the 1960s. Can the book get worse? Of course it can. But it also gets sadder as Wilcock describes in unnecessary detail an almost day-by-day account of his childhood, from the age of three onward. The artlessness of his narration and the minutiae of his memories are balanced only by the depressing horror of what Wilcock unintentionally reveals.

Please note that nothing here is intended to diagnose Wilcock with a psychological condition. The diagnoses mentioned in my review are those Wilcock disclosed himself. He did not provide a discussion of whether he sought professional treatment in the past, or whether any treatment is ongoing.

​Wilcock describes his childhood in Scotia, New York, a stone’s throw from where I write this in Albany. He says that his mother was heavily influenced by the hoaxes of Carlos Castenada. He tells of how from his earliest childhood he had outlandish, wild dreams that he realized from his mother’s New Age babble must be messages from another world. His mother cried wildly when she became pregnant with his brother because she was dreaming of UFOs and their dangers. He wistfully remembers his love of M*A*S*H* and Happy Days, which both harked back to the 1950s, and he claims that Sesame Street had made him an advanced student before he ever entered kindergarten. He claims to have become “fully aware” of world events due to watching The CBS Evening News, and he says his father’s love of the era’s rock music shaped his understanding of reality. He recalls a rush of emotion at hearing ABBA for the first time, only to have his parents forbid him from listening to disco music because only rock was acceptable.

The childhood Wilcock describes explains a lot, and it is disturbing. He describes a half-crazed ex-Christian New Age mother who actually told him that she would stop being close to him once his brother Michael was born, a disgruntled artistic father who resented the world for making his chosen talents unprofitable, an emotionally disturbed brother who would lash out in violent temper tantrums, and a boy—Wilcock himself—who retreated into fantasy to escape the towering arguments his parents would have each night year after year after depressing year until their divorce a decade later. Wilcock confesses that he was so upset and anxious by the age of five from the stress of his childhood home that he did permanent damage to his face from excessive thumb-sucking. He later became a compulsive eater to bury the pain through secret snacking. “My life turned into a nightmare,” Wilcock said.

Even in describing this, Wilcock can’t quite see his own childhood objectively, and he stops the story over and again to retreat into happier memories of 1970s pop culture, which he seems to have idealized as an escape from a reality that to this day he wishes to deny through appeal to space aliens. All of this is interwoven with his mother’s paranoid conspiracy theories—she blamed the flu vaccine for a health crisis she experienced when Wilcock was three (and he, of course, has super-memory and recalls all the details)—which warped Wilcock’s understanding of what is real and what is not irrevocably. His mother took him to a hippie commune where Wilcock was again traumatized (his word, which he uses ceaselessly to describe his life events) when the hippies made fun of his effete mannerisms and when he witnessed a hippie overdose on LSD, and his mother freaked him out about Freemasons by spinning horror stories when their Masonic neighbors had unidentified people over for an event. Wilcock’s parents worked themselves into terror, imagining that the Masons were robotic zombies enacting dark rituals beneath their bedroom window. His mother and father thought that Rosemary’s Baby had come to life, and his father told him that they had to hide because the Masons would murder them all violently if anyone discovered that they had seen them skulking about in their dark rites. “I was surprised that they were telling both Michael and me this, considering how young we were, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my entire life.” Wilcock believes now that his neighbors were enacting a Satanic sex orgy. (His description, if true, actually sounds like the neighbors had a “key party” or were swingers and were trying to avoid the prying eyes of the Wilcocks.)

I’ll be honest: I’m not entirely comfortable talking about what increasingly seems to be the trauma that a disturbed boy experienced in an emotionally abusive environment. He frames it as a triumphant story, but it is not. Consider this example that says about everything: He vividly remembers being four years old and seeing a commercial for Keds in which kids put on special sneakers and flew. He begged his parents for those sneakers, and after getting them jumped up and down trying to fly. A normal person would smile at childhood naïveté, but Wilcock considered it a betrayal by the media. He also claimed that the commercials influenced his dreams of flying and were preparing him for “the powers of ascension” to the spirit realm. This is not normal but seems to follow logically from the childhood he describes. Wilcock now believes he has spiritual superpowers granted him by space aliens.

The second example is sadder, and deserves to be quoted in full. It occurs when Wilcock is four years old and watched Star Wars. He identified Obi-Wan Kenobi with a vague paternal figure he conjured up in his dreams, and after seeing the movie started dreaming of Sir Alec Guinness:

​The very next morning after I saw Star Wars, the wise old man appeared again as Obi-Wan Kenobi—and the interior of his ship looked even more like some of the scenes in Star Wars. He now appeared to me in the same glowing, luminous form as Obi-Wan had in the movie. This appears to have been an effort to link a being who was very real in the dream plane with a symbol from the physical plane that I could now easily identify and interpret. The old man told me that many people on Earth were going to transform into a luminous form like this, and that if I followed what my mother told me about being a good person, it could happen to me too. I felt even closer to him than I did to my own parents, and when I woke up and realized it was only a dream, I started crying. This happened dozens of times.

Remember, Wilcock was four years old but to this day consider these events to be the defining moments of his life. A normal person would read this as a kid having a dream about a movie he just saw. David Wilcock does not, but the kicker is the end of that description where Wilcock admits that his dream world was more real to him than his waking life, and that he dreamed up characters to provide him with the love and support that he was not receiving in his paranoid, argument-filled home.

At the conclusion of chapter four, we are only up to Wilcock’s fifth birthday.

After this, Wilcock describes increasing disturbances, including nightmares of burning alive, sleepwalking, paranoid fear, a “vibrating pressure” in his skull, and his continued use of pop culture to construct a fantasy world to escape into. He doesn’t call it that, of course; he pretends that pop culture was simply preparing him for “ascension” to He-Man-like acquisition of supernatural power. But anyone not steeped in fringe beliefs would draw a very different conclusion. He describes his entry into school, claiming that all of the kids were destined to “hate me” because he was too smart and tested too high, and he describes being bullied as a child, bullying that lasted through his college years (first for intelligence and then for weight and then for personality and then for drug use) and resulted, he said, from his efforts to talk about ancient mysteries with his elementary school classmates. He painfully recalls losing control of his bowels one night in the sixth grade, and how his growing girth “disconnected” him from his body. He says that he escaped from this by watching In Search of… and getting a “cosmic high” from seeing his mother’s paranoid beliefs confirmed by television.

He also said that Mork & Mindy gave him “cosmic feelings,” but at this point in the book I was too depressed and saddened to make a Pam Dawber joke, especially since Wilcock says that Mork’s conversations with his off-camera father figure Orson (Wilcock’s words—he was actually Mork’s commanding officer), which Wilcock says were just like his dreams of Obi-Wan Kenobi “only funnier.” He seems incapable of psychological self-reflection. “Our limbic, reptilian brain cannot differentiate between the images in a photograph or film and actual reality,” he writes, with blithe unawareness.

By the time Wilcock was eight, his mother had convinced him that he had ESP and encouraged him and his friends to develop their ESP skills. Wilcock said he formed an ESP club because he wanted to be just like Nostradamus after watching a TV airing of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow on HBO. He claims that the other kids didn’t recognize how great Wilcock’s ESP powers were, and he compares these power to those of Jesus, saying that his rejection by his childhood friends made him want to do “the really good stuff” that Jesus could also do, like resurrecting the dead and walking on water. He claims that he was able to make a bully fall off his bicycle by focusing a mental laser at the bike with his ESP. He does not seem to notice that his own confession that he was “disconnected” psychologically from his body seems to find reflection in his desire for flight, astral project, ESP, and other ways to escape the limits of the body.

Wilcock adds that his life changed when his father bought a VCR and color TV and then told him that the world would soon be transformed by an explosion of energy called “ascension.” His mother would force him to talk to a tree at the Schenectady County Public Library and wait for its rustling leaves to answer. Wilcock can’t separate his lived experience from pop culture, and movies blend into his memories almost seamlessly, especially when movies like E.T. depict the kinds of friendship Wilcock seems upset about never having had: “I identified so strongly with extraterrestrials that I felt like I was Elliott, and when E.T. died it seemed like I had lost the only real friend I ever had.” Apparently he had forgotten about Obi-Wan Kenobi by that point.

After his parents’ divorce, his mother became the mother from Carrie, angrily micromanaging Wilcock’s life and threatening punishments for any infraction. Wilcock said that as a result he developed an attraction to dominant personalities and placed himself in submissive positions until the space aliens helped him to overcome his submissive personality. Indeed, he credits himself with overcoming his own “hero-worship” impulses because that act, he says, allowed him to achieve telepathic connection to space aliens. “Good ETs,” you see, are like good people and treat you as equals. “Bad ETs” are like bullies and feed off of hero-worship and submissive impulses. Isn’t it amazing the way the entire cosmos is structured to perfectly reflect David Wilcock’s traumatized psyche?

Tomorrow: David Wilcock goes to high school and college, discovers drugs, and continues to be repeatedly traumatized by life.

​"The very next morning after I saw Star Wars, the wise old man appeared again as Obi-Wan Kenobi...in the same glowing, luminous form as Obi-Wan had in the movie."

Except Obi-Wan didn't appear in a glowing, luminous form in Star Wars. After he dies, we only briefly hear his voice ("Use the Force, Luke"). It's in the following movie, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), that Obi-Wan appears in a glowing, luminous form.

This might seem like a pedantic, geeky nitpick, but this is a great illustration of how human memory actually works. Our minds aren't digital recording devices; we don't have perfect, objective recall of events. When we remember something, our brains are trying to reconstruct events from various bits and pieces of information.

In this case, when Wilcock is remembering a profoundly formative event from when he was four years old, he's conflating it with memories of a movie he wouldn't have seen until he was at least seven.

Obi-Wan as a Force ghost didn't appear in Star Wars, but his presence after his death is the emotional climax of the movie, and he does appear in ghost form in the second movie, so Wilcock's brain connected the two appearances, and created a memory of having seen Obi-Wan as a glowing, luminous form in the first movie. And by his own account, his memories of the movies bled into his dreams, which seemed more real to him that the waking world.

This specific point may seem trivial, but it speaks to a much larger point. This is how human memory works. We conflate memories of actual events from different times and places, along with bits and pieces of dreams, fantasies, movies we've seen, and stories others have told us. Human memory is simply not reliable, and trying to accurately remember childhood events in exacting detail is a fool's errand.

This is also a problem with much of the "fringe" literature on encounters with aliens, ghosts, and the like, especially the "recovered" memories of alien abductions. The individuals involved may very well have clear, solid memories of having encountered an alien (or a ghost, or a faerie, or what have you), but that doesn't mean it actually happened. We all have clear, solid memories of things that just weren't so.

Such as seeing Obi-Wan Kenobi in a glowing, luminous form in the first Star Wars movie, and then dreaming about it in 1977.

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Jim

9/25/2016 02:33:49 pm

Nice catch.

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David Bradbury

9/25/2016 05:23:24 pm

The Keds commercial sounds similarly misremembered- though there was at least one animated commercial for PF Flyers in which cartoon kids briefly flew.

But we seem to have learned that Penguin fired its last fact-checkers.

Kathleen

9/25/2016 06:27:21 pm

I remember those ads. "PF Flyers! Run Faster and Jump Higher!". I immediately thought of the commercial when I read about his "memory".

TheBigMike

9/26/2016 01:13:55 pm

Thank you very much for this comment. This was the first thing that came to my mind as well and i would have made all the same points. Glad to see I'm not the only one to notice the Star Wars Inconsistency (Sounds like the title to an episode of Big Bang Theory... only sadder and with more childhood issues... which I didn't think was possible, but, hey...).

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Only Me

9/25/2016 01:43:03 pm

You were right, Jason. This is sad taken to a whole new level. What we have is an emotionally abused boy, using imagination to create a world where he feels special.

His belief in aliens is merely justification for the imaginary world of a little boy that never grew up.

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Andy White

9/25/2016 01:43:51 pm

This was hard to read. I didn't make it all the way through.

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Kathleen

9/25/2016 02:10:31 pm

The mother in me made me want to hug that poor damaged child.

It's bad that he was shaped into a greedy wanna be fringe/religous cult leader, but at least he's not bringing a gun to a schoolyard.

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Jim

9/25/2016 02:38:21 pm

Thank God he wasn't exposed to Count Chocula, I shutter to think what may have happened.

Templar Secrets

9/25/2016 02:47:00 pm

We could have found out that Bram Stoker was anti-Semitic and this fact would have inspired director Tod Browning make Bela Lugosi wear the Star of David in the Dracula film.

Only Me

9/25/2016 04:47:43 pm

>>>director Tod Browning make Bela Lugosi wear the Star of David in the Dracula film<<<

To be fair, Kathleen, this is David Wilcock we're talking about. He very well could be making up his own past.

Kathleen

9/25/2016 06:36:20 pm

Well, I wanted to comfort the child that was described. I cry at movies, too and I know both are fictional. The thought of actually embracing Wilcock gives me the willies. To be fair, he probably doesn't want me hugging him, either.

Shane Sullivan

9/25/2016 02:00:09 pm

Amazing. His childhood might actually have been worse than mine.

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A Buddhist

9/25/2016 02:26:11 pm

Toxic environments poison their inhabitants. I wish that I could tell him the right degree of faith to put in dreams and other such things.

Out of curiosity, Jason, does his biography specify which denomination of Christianity his mother left? that may effect the post-christian life. My father was raised in a very liberal form of Christianity and has become a gentle platonist; yet Marshall Applewhite was raised as a Calvinist of some sort, and repeatedly included elements of predestination within his thoughts. And then there are the imposters to Buddhist wisdom who were raised Buddhists of one sect or another.

All under heaven who see me will realize that I have had a difficult life; I am glad that I have discovered the Buddha-Dhamma and was not trusting enough in dreams to take seriously a dream in which I met aliens who were Nichiren Buddhists.

No, I don't recall him specifying the branch of Christianity. Of course, with the autobiography taking up 300 or so of the book's 500+ pages, I might have forgotten by the end.

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Kal

9/25/2016 04:16:37 pm

I have encountered this kind of personality before. His books are a weird narcissistic pathological mess, apparently. The odd irony of this is that everything he equates as a defining moment or some out of the ordinary experiment, are not any more out of bounds than a suburban upper class kid disliked by his self perceived poorer peers.

He is not so much out there as just another fringe kid raised into adulthood and mis-remembering events as an adult.

His book is 11 on the 'internet version of the ny times' best seller list, which he likely hacked, and made it be on the best seller list. I seriously doubt this book is on that list, but if he's going to hack the Times, he made it 11 and not 1 because that would be too obvious.

Maybe though he is mis-remembering the joke from Spinal Tap, 'It goes to eleven' as a higher number than one.

Okay, and I've never heard of a preacher kid being encouraged to listen to rock and not disco. Rock records were the 'devil's music' at the school across the way. He is recalling that wrong. No, it was rock. At least it was in suburbia.

Mixing Obi Wan and Yoda is pretty funny.

Also the description seems pretty entertaining for being a lot of hooey. It could be on fringe seller's lists.

These publishers he paid are the self help end, and it's still technically vanity press, and there is nothing wrong with self publishing five books.

He seems very full of himself and does not have a self esteem problem.

He seems more typical of a 'nerdy kid' than someone who contacted spirits or aliens, as it doesn't seem likely he met aliens. Spirits though, that's another thing. He might have met the happy sauce one too many times, or even some happy 'shrooms.

Maybe some of his experiences were actually an accidental, or deliberate, taking of drugs.

It sure seems like some of that sounds like what you're like on drugs.

Maybe he got into those movies like Slackers while in college. Heh.

It is odd though he actually believed his Keds could fly and was disappointed. That takes a serious level of gravitas to think such a thing was real.

This is where it should go from there.

This is theory only. And then maybe he constructed actual rockets onto his Kids, using duct tape and bottle rockets...but the experiment failed, with the loss of one shoe, and severe burns to his feet. This was a defining experience, as was the concussion when he fell over and cracked his head on the pavement. When he got older though, he tried it with his skateboard, ending in a similar experience he mixed upo with the later, and a collision with a '81 Datson.

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Brian

9/25/2016 04:41:11 pm

Everyone's assuming that Wilcock's memories of his childhood are true. Considering the quality of his other memories, I have to wonder what his parents were really like. Perhaps just typical middle-class parents, a tad self-absorbed, not making enough of their desperate darling? Unless someone else (the brother? a mother suing her son for libel?) speaks up, we'll never know. He's certainly done a primo job of gaining sympathy here!

As always, we can only go by what Wilcock himself said. Memory being what it is, there is always a degree of fictionalization in memoir, but his artless presentation suggests that he genuinely believes that he experienced unending trauma and is not trying to create a fictional past for artistic reasons. Indeed, his self-presentation tends to undercut his own conclusions, which suggests that he is reporting his memories honestly, even if they aren't exactly in line with reality. How much of it was his perception vs. objective reality, we cannot, of course, say. That's aid, I believe he grew up working class, and stress over money contributed to some of the problems he experienced.

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Kal

9/25/2016 04:58:05 pm

Did you think Datsan? He thought at first Daschund.

If they were as hippie like as he implied, they were probably okay with it.

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Killbuck

9/25/2016 09:24:09 pm

This reinforces my impression in my reply yesterday.

Wilcock is setting himself up as a mystic prophet. All the pop culture references aside, which can be interpreted variously, I am seeing a bottom line here. Wilcock is less interested in promoting the aliens and mystical themes, as he is in promoting himself as a cosmic spiritual guide and master, worthy of followers. He is using a classic set up- the young chosen one, tested by adversity, a gifted outcast in youth, whose great gifts are misunderstood by the brutish masses. He is a child of destiny who, in a way is preparing himself to revenge the doubters. Yet this is theater.

We have seen this before with real and would be cultists. Their suffering, real or invented, has honed them to a higher knowing... an ability to see the cosmic plane, and gives him the authority to bestow these teachings to those open mined enough to see the beauty of his tortured truth. This uses sympathy in a very disingenuous way, through manipulation.

Aliens and cosmic consciousness be damned. His ascension is to a cult of personality to himself.

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Mark L ND

9/25/2016 11:56:55 pm

A beautifully-written review/summary, and also a sad story that I speculate may be common among these people.

Childhood trauma can indeed affect people for the rest of their lives if they never receive help. And not recognizing the need for help is also very common.

Today's society is very complex, and if a person misses out on a few societal cues or adjustments during his early years, it can be very difficult to "fit in". Not that we should necessarily try to always fit in, but a certain amount of that is required if you wish to make your life a little more tolerable.

Whether that's good or bad depends on your point of view I guess.

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TheBigMike

9/26/2016 01:24:42 pm

Speaking as a mental health professional, this "history" of childhood trauma would definitely pique my interest. There is a lot of metaphorical meat on this particular bone. Some of the details suggest the development of binge-eating disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and/or even boderline personality disorder (which would be interesting since something like 95% of people suffering from borderline are female and almost all of them suffered from childhood sexual abuse).
I am NOT offering any kind of diagnosis for Mr. Wilcox. I'm just commenting on some of the mental health disorders that could be associated with the kinds of things Mr. Wilcox reports about his childhood, his present, and some of the behaviors and statements I've seen from him on television.
I would be fascinated to have him in my office so that I could have the opportunity to have some one-on-one time with him. We do know that pubic and private personas can be very different. I suspect that Mr. Wilcox is much the same off camera as he is on camera, but there is only one way of telling.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone will ever know... He does not seem to be the kind of person who would seek psychotherapy, or even comply with it if court mandated.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.